The invention generally relates to computers and computer software and, in particular, to methods, systems, and computer program products for increasing the validity or confidence of search results retrieved from a pool of pre-computed or pre-collected search results.
A common object in database technology is to ensure short response times to database queries that require the processing of large volumes of data. For example, such computing-power consuming processing has to be performed in response to so-called “open queries”, which contain little input information (e.g., only one or two parameters out of many possible parameters are specified and/or the specified value ranges of the parameters are broad). Consequently, such open queries may generally lead to a large number of results. Possibilities to speed up data processing by increasing hardware performance are limited. Thus, attention is drawn to improving the mechanisms underlying the processing of large data volumes.
One approach to shorten query times may be to pre-compute or pre-collect expected results to queries and to maintain the corresponding query results in a pool of pre-computed or pre-collected results. Queries are then not processed on the large, distributed, and/or complex-to-calculate data basis, but are directed to the pool. For example, this approach is employed by Internet search engines that utilize automated robots or crawlers to collect content of web servers and store this pre-collected content in a search engine repository. Internet search queries are then answered on the basis of the repository, instead of retrieving the web servers' primary content at search query time.
However, a disadvantage of this approach is that the pre-computed or pre-collected query results get outdated if the underlying primary data changes. In this case, the pool of pre-computed or pre-collected results may return incorrect results to the inquiring client. This issue may be somewhat remedied by improving the validity or correctness of the pre-computed or pre-collected query results by optimizing the re-computation or re-collection strategy, for example, by re-computing or re-collecting these query results with priority that are likely outdated. However, perfect validity or correctness of the pre-computed or pre-collected query results at all times is unachievable.
Improved methods, systems, and computer program products are needed that increase the validity or confidence of search results retrieved from a pool of pre-computed or pre-collected search results.